SATA Optical Drive USB Cable

My Problem

I wanted the speed of an SSD drive and the ability to backup internally to the replaced drive.

My Fix

I followed all of the instructions. You HAVE to read them all very carefully! Pull connections in the right directions! The physical change, removing the original drive, installing the SSD drive, removing the optical drive and installing the original drive in the optic drive bay all took about an hour.

Removing the optical drive was the trickiest part. Moving the camera cable by teasing it out of the channel was daunting but I went slow.

Everything went very well and worked first time on power-up.

My Advice

I took the time to create the image of the original drive using the recommended software "SuperDuper". It takes a couple hours to back up the drive but it was worth the time. I also created a Yosemite flash drive installer as a precaution.

Now that the SSD drive is the default boot drive, I'm taking my time deleting programs off the original drive by running them off the SSD first, making sure they function properly before deleting them. Once I have the original 500GB drive clean, I will use it as my Time Machine backup instead of my external Seagate.